I was wondering from other PhD students on a studentship with a project already predefined how much room within a PhD studentship should there be to find your own research path?
I'm asking because my experience so far with being able to find my own path has been dismal. I feel like anything that I may bring to the project that was not in the original studentship brief has not been supported by my lead supervisor yet they keep asking "what I want to research"? The ideas that I threw around the first 6 months, whilst I admit quite uniformed at times (I was only 6 months in!), were repeatedly wholly dismissed or unsupported. I gave up trying to develop any new paths and started to treat the research like a case of project management, which I must say was pragmatic if I wanted to finish in 3-4 years but a bit unfulfilling intellectually. Now I am working on developing method and thought that i might be able to find some space within the project to make it my own. After three months of bashing my head against a wall trying to develop a methodology that my supervisor finds suitable, I am resigning myself to undertaking the methods that were listed in the original brief.
So my question is, beyond getting a sense of what the experience of other students on a studentship is/was, what should my realistic expectations of a studentship be? Is it just a piece of project management bringing someone elses research plan into empirical fruitation?